One of the most terrifying thoughts for me was not knowing if I would be able to write enough to fill an entire book. The prospect of writing 85,000 words for a book sounded crazy!
That's so many, I thought to myself! How on earth could I fill that much. I only have a few scenes in my head.
Well thanks to my outline I have a rough idea as to where I want this story to go and I know about how far down the road I am on my story map. I came to the realization recently that I might actually have to start cutting stuff from my book to speed it up and get to the good stuff, cut to the chase, make with the interesting. It was pretty satisfying to know that from what I am looking at right now I can write that many words. The trick, however, is not in the writing of the words, the trick is in actually telling the story, and telling it in a way that doesn't bore people to tears.
A friend of my recently came across a writing competition held by NPR. They are currently in the 11th round, so I'm assuming this is a regular thing over there for them.
It's called 3 Minute Fiction. They take submissions from wannabe writers, but there's a catch. This has to be something that can be read in 3 minutes or less. So for writers that translates to 600 words or less.
That sounds like quite a bit, but just to give you a frame of reference as of this word right here, I have written 276 words, that almost half of my allotment to tell an entire short story!
Yeah, it was going to be challenging for me. I was getting used to filling a story out, making sure I could reach 85,000 words or more. 600 words is a drop in the bucket by comparison. Most writers would consider this a warm up.
So I thought on it for a whole day. I put out mental flyers hoping someone would pick it up and step off my mental bus and tell me a quick but entertaining story.
I was in luck. One spunky gal answered my call! So I had my idea. Now I have to tell it in less than a page and half of double spaced text in Word....
I did what I always do. I decided I was just going to write. I'll thin it out later. It would be easier to do that then try to compromise my story by worrying about the length as I went.
After I wrote it all out I thought it was pretty good, now it was time to check the word count. I use OpenOffice and lucky for me they put that option right up in your face in the tools menu. It's probably my second most used tool. Right behind spell check.
I opened the counter and I saw the number and I was shocked. In a quick 45 minutes I had written almost 700 words. And I felt like I was going light at that.
I knew that anything over 600 words would be disqualified so I had to reign it in with a few words to spare. You know, just in case.
So I started going through my story again, line by line, sentence be sentence. I was getting rid of any words or descriptions that were not absolutely necessary to the telling of my story. It probably took me almost as long to edit the doc as it did to write it.
I probably read it through about 4 or 5 times before I felt satisfied. My final draft had 594 words. After that I realized what a great exercise this was. It really made me look at each sentence and made me ensure that each word was being used as efficiently as possible. I had a story to tell, I couldn't waste words on things were not vital to the story.
The competition closed last night. So we'll see how I do. The theme of this round was "Someone finds something that they have no intention of returning."
The winner gets signed copies of the guest judge's books and gets published in the Fall Edition of the Paris Review.
They are going to announce the winner in early June but before that they will be posting a few of their favorites on their webpage as well as reading a few aloud on their weekend radio show.
One of the rules states that this cannot be published anywhere before they announce a winner to the contest. So once they announce the winner and I am free to post I will do so here. I want you all to be able to read a sample of what I have been learning all this time. I figured if you're still hanging around you deserve an award for your loyalty!
I'm pretty proud of what I wrote. It was a fun exercise and I plan to do round 12 when it's up. Even if I don't win I got a pretty good prize out of doing this. My new friend is fresh off the bus and told me a quick story for this contest, but she has a whole lot more to tell. I decided her story is going to be a really fun one to write. She's waiting for now, but I don't think she'll be waiting for long!
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